Entries Tagged 'Medicine' ↓

Recently I started playing basketball regularly again. I play with a bunch of doctors from PYNEH, all from different departments. They’re all pretty good, some better than others. The good thing is they’re pretty organized, playing regularly every Thursday. They’re pretty serious about the game too. They have games with different hospitals and also with different pharmaceutical companies. They also have their own uniform and also team shoe! Anyway, it’s pretty good playing with them. I need the exercise pretty bad. All the study over the past few years made me gain a bit of weight. One night a week wasn’t enough for me to loss all that weight though. I’ll probably have to pick up another sport as well. But exercise isn’t the only thing I’m getting at these games. I get quite a bit of counseling during these basketball games. Most of these people are doctors who have been practicing for a few years. They have a much deeper insight into the profession and it really helps when I have to choose my specialty. Last night, there were only 4 of us there, and I got to talk with this ENT doctor for quite a while. Maybe I should go into ENT?

Technorati Tags: Basketball, Internship, Medicine

I’m getting more and more fed up with the phlebotomist in this hospital. They run this huge scam in the hospital. They’re always too busy to do their job. You call them about work in ward “a” and they say they’re too busy working in ward “b” and can’t come over. You walk over to ward “b” and call them about work in ward “b” they’ll say they’re too busy in ward “a”. I can never figure out where they are.

Today I ordered a bunch of blood test, I left my orders on a very visible location at the nursing counter (the same place I leave them every day). The phlebotomist just walked right past the nursing station and left. You call her about the blood test and she said they couldn’t find the labels. She just left without even looking for them. They’re such lazy bastards. I end up doing a pretty much all the blood taking the whole day. Kinda pissed at the moment…

Happy CNY. I know it’s a bit late. Been pretty lazy for the last week. Holiday was nice. I managed to get 3 days of rest and quite a number of red packets, most of them are actually from people I know in the hospital.

It was a pretty relaxing holiday. Played some Cluedo at home. Played with a friend’s dog, not to mention lots of sleep. I was pretty happy that I didn’t have to be on-call during chinese new year.

Getting back to work is a pain. The problem with work is there’s not much happening. It was all pretty mind-numbing work. I was being a clerk, and there wasn’t much for me to do. Most of us end up spending at least 30-40% of our time hiding in this little room which was actually allocated for family medicine trainees. Some read, some sleep, some play cards. We go there to be out of sight, so no one actually realize how much work we actually do. Time is spent just day-dreaming. I kinda wish that we had a little bit more work. Just a little more to keep us occupied. Doctors here don’t really teach. They’re alright, but there’s just not enough activities for us to do. They aren’t in the mood to teach most of the time. We were required to attend out-patient clinic during post-call day, but they stopped including us a while back.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I think one of the reason I’m not really enjoying myself at OG is because I’m not getting much action. To be honest, there’s not much emergency in OG. Most of the emergencies we had to deal with was emergency LSCS. There’s not much else for us to deal with. I guess I’m a little bit bored.

Technorati Tags: Hong Kong, Internship, Medicine

2005’s been a pretty long year. It started off with some intense studying, trying to graduate from medical school, and ended after 6 months being an intern. It’s been a tough but great year.

• The studying was kind of shitty. Having to do so much of it in one go sucked. The good thing is I was able to pull through and graduate. I admit I was pretty stressed out about it. I nearly broke down after the Surgical written exam. I thought I did pretty bad, but I still managed to pass at the end. Managed to pass everything at the end, so that was pretty good.
• Holiday was great! I had the opportunity to go to Sydney to chill for a month. It was good seeing friends and family over there. It’s always great to be able to just chill in Sydney. That’s what the place is for really… I then still had almost one more month of holiday after coming back to Sydney, just chilling in Hong Kong and then actually going to Sydney again with Wendy.
• After the exams, I got my new car. The Audi A4 arrived after I returned from Sydney. It’s very different from the SLK I’m used to, but it’s a pretty good car to drive.
• The transition from a medical student to a doctor is perhaps the largest change of all. I officially got the title the day I start working. It does feel good, the way patients look at you and entrust their lives if your hands. Well, most but not all patients are nice. Some can be pretty bitching and unreasonable. You learn to deal with these “marfan” patients and get one with your work. The first few weeks was perhaps the most demanding. We mastered the practical aspect of medicine. It was pretty scary at first, being on-call all by yourself, but then after a little while you know what you’re suppose to do and you just do your job. CMC was a great start for me. Being in a small regional hospital allowed me to take things slowly and learn at my own pace. There was no rush as there weren’t that many patients. After mastering it all, I had the opportunity to work in a much larger hospital which increased my exposure.
• It’s already been 6 months since I started my career, and things have been going pretty well for me. And in another 6 months, I’ll be officially a fully licensed doctor. Time flies. I’ve already started looking for jobs, and hopefully, I’ll be in a residency program training in 6months times.
• I just left the operators’ room, picked up a new pager for my next rotation in 2006. I cease to be “266″. My new pager number for the next 3 months will be “947″. Give me a call. The operator’s number is 25957111.

Technorati Tags: Audi, Hong Kong, Internship, Medicine, Sydney

It’s this time of the year again. All is good. Merry Christmas to you all. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who I haven’t been able to see this holiday. It’s been a busy and long 6 months of work already. So far so good. I’m still enjoying what I do even though it’s got a lot more routine now… I look forward to getting off work every day, going home or going out for dinner etc. Working also means you have to pay taxes. I got my first Christmas present from the government yesterday. They sent me my tax return on Christmas eve! That’s very nice of them! I wonder why they don’t send them out after Christmas… They probably want to remind people about the taxes so people don’t go spend so much money during the holidays and save up some money to pay their taxes! Anyway, I still don’t know how much taxes I’m suppose to pay this year. I hope it’s not a lot because I haven’t got much savings during this year with our shockingly low salary.

My rotation in surgery is finally coming to an end. It’s been a good six months. PYNEH surgery isn’t too bad. I thought it was going to be hell, but it’s been a fast 3 months and before you know it, I’m moving on already. PYNEH is very difficult from CMC. I suppose because CMC is such a small hospital, there’s a lot less things to see. CMC has been great, and I managed to learn a lot there. In PYNEH, I got to do a lot more minor surgeries, and had more experience with inserting chest drains etc. The scope of the their services are very difficult, and I guess both places has their advantages and disadvantages.

After 3 months, I’m still very pissed about us having to do ECG. Every time I have to do an ECG, the nurses have to listen to me rant and bitch about why I’m doing it and not them. I always as them to give me a good reason why we have to do ECGs and they still haven’t given me a good answer. The fact is there’s none. They claim that when we have to do ECGs it’s usually because it’s a urgent case, and it has to be done right away. In fact most of the time when we have to do an ECG, we’re else where doing other things, and can’t be there right away. By the time we get there, it’ll be a good half an hour or even an hour. Then we have to spend another 10 minutes trying to untangle all the wires and then spend a few minutes trying to get the leads on to the patient. Half of the time the lead won’t stay on and we have to try to stick them on with tape. Then it’ll be another 10 minutes trying to get the patient still to get an ECG with the least artifacts. During other occasions, there’ll always be 1 or 2 leads where all you get is artifacts and you can’t do a good interpretation. Anyway, it’ll be at least 60 to 90 minutes before the ECG’s ready. With all that time waste, it would be a whole lot easier if the nurses try to get the ECG right away, so that we can come right away and interpret the damn thing. Isn’t that a better use of the time. I could be else doing important things saving another person’s life instead of playing with an ECG machine. Yes the ECG is urgent, so let me interpret the damn thing the minute I get there…

With the ending of the 2nd rotation, the job hunting season has just began. It’s time to look for training post for July next year. Last year was a great year with most people getting into a training post. I heard this year is going to be relative good as well. There’s news that there’s a lot of departures with HA, which means more job openings for juniors. Since the beginning of December, I’ve been trying to get the process going. I starting writing my cover letters, collecting references from my seniors, fixing up my CV etc. It’s a lot of difficult work. I had to stop watching DVD’s at night and work after work. I sometimes have time to do a bit of it at work which was good since there’s a lot of stationaries there. After six months of work, I’m happy to say I’m definitely a surgical person, doesn’t matter what kind of surgery I’m in. My first patch of letters have just been mailed 2 days ago. It should have arrived at the COS’s office by now. The process is kind of stupid. We all apply to position within the Hospital Authority, and for some stupid reason, each hospital, each department has their own hiring process. So instead of doing a joint admission kind of thing, we have to write letters to at least 30-40 different departments. It would be nice if HA has a centralized hiring department then I won’t be spending so much time doing envelops!

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Hong Kong, Internship, MBBS, Medicine